Tradurre per comprendere: colpa, pentimento e rinascita in “Semejnoe sčast’e” di Lev Tolstoj e nella traduzione italiana di Clemente Rebora

Abstract

This essay deals with the issue of guilt, repentance and rebirth in the short novel Semejnoe scast’e ( Family Happiness ) by Lev N. Tolstoy (1859). The author first considers the concepts of ‘offense’ , ‘repentance’ and ‘forgiveness’ through an analysis of the Russian terminology used by Tolstoy for these semantic fields ( obida , dosada , vina , raskajanie , pokajanie ); next, in an analysis of Clemente Rebora’s Italian translation (1920), special attention is paid to the differences from the original text that signal the translator’s interpretive reading, which, at the same time, becomes a tool for understanding it. It is shown how, in the transition from Russian into Italian, semantic shifts and phonetic symbolism add a mystical tension to the original Tolstoyan text which is typical of the poetry of Clemente Rebora.